PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — Leading men generally hate to be overshadowed by other performances.

But even Pompeii star Kit Harington concedes it's hard not to be dwarfed by history's most famous volcano disaster, the 79 A.D. eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius.

"I don't mind playing second fiddle to a volcano. Everyone did in this (film)," says Harington, sitting amid the splendor of the Getty Villa museum, a re-creation of a luxurious abode destroyed by nature's fury. "The volcano is the whole point of the movie. It was great seeing it go off."

The eruption in Pompeii (opening Friday nationwide) had to be added in post-production with computer graphic technology. Yet the reviews for the mountain's performance were solid after filmmakers allowed independent volcano and Roman-history experts to see Pompeii in advance.

"It blew my mind," says Florian Schwandner, a volcanologist and geochemist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "I was quite amazed when I saw how realistically the volcano and the eruptions were captured. At times I was not sure if it was animation or footage from actual eruptions."

Director Paul W.S. Anderson used digital photography from the actual site to digitally enhance the scenes, adding thousands of feet to its pre-explosion glory. Then he worked extensively with computer graphic artists to recreate the disaster.

"Our mandate to them was, 'Don't make it look cool. Make it look real.' Reality was the coolest thing to bring onto the screen," says Anderson (Resident Evil, The Three Musketeers). "Hand on my heart, I can say we did the best job we could to put the audience inside the disaster in the most accurate way possible."

Schwandner was most pleased with the depiction of the growing earthquake tremors in the days before the eruption and the massive explosion itself. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't lava flow but the supremely hot and fast-moving "pyroclastic surge" rushing down the mountain (at speeds over 200 mph) that killed most of the 16,000 victims.

"That was very realistically done, all very accurate," Schwandner says.

And then there was the tsunami on top of the earthquakes and eruption. "We cannot reconstruct the height, but a tsunami did happen, and what happens on screen is feasible," says Schwandner.

A few liberties were taken — a lava lake is depicted,yet studies have shown Vesuvius had no such formation. Further, fiery objects thrown from the volcano appear to be slightly enhanced, say the experts.

"They got a lot right but used artistic license in some places," adds Rosaly Lopes, a senior research scientist of planetary science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who gave the film an A-/B+ grade for realism. "No volcano movie I've seen has gotten it totally right. Pompeii comes close."

Anderson also obsessed over depicting daily life in Pompeii, building 30 detailed sets based on the famously preserved city, including a villa and a street scene where hand-formed rocks matched the stones used on Pompeii's roads.

Roman history professor Sarah Yeomans of West Virginia University was impressed by the "attention to detail in the street scenes," which included authentic-looking Roman graffiti. She was less convinced by the depiction of women, such as Aurelia (Carrie-Anne Moss), the influential wife to Pompeii's richest man.

"The role of a woman in Pompeii society would have been much more low-profile," says Yeomans. "Hollywood takes license. But these types of films are important because people get interested in history. This movie bring the city alive."